In November 2024, Lincolnshire-born Chris Jesson flew into Guernsey in a storm. He had left his house that same day with four bags to start a new life in a place he says he has ‘always felt at home.’
He had burned out with his previous job as a town planner, and since early 2021 had started to slowly establish himself as a gardener instead from his house in Nottinghamshire.
Its garden was just muddy ground at first, he said.
‘In lockdown, I basically got the bug for being outside, and suddenly I had this blank-canvas garden to develop. I thought, “Well, why not track this?” I had no gardening experience at that point, apart from wandering somewhere and going, “Oh, that looks pretty”,’ Chris said.
In January 2021, he set up his Instagram account as the ‘Groovy Gardener’, principally to avoid attracting the ire of his family and friends by flooding their social media with pictures of plants from his personal accounts.
‘There was no career basis at all. We’d just come out of the UK’s second lockdown, so I’d really missed the boat of people being stuck at home on social media.’
The Groovy Gardener began attracting attention, and soon enough he had amassed thousands of followers. Slowly, he began to transition away from town planning to training as a horticultural consultant. He had loved the job for 13 years, but found that it had become too stressful for him. He trained up as a gardener professionally at Easton Walled Gardens, various National Trust properties and became a charity ambassador for Greenfingers.
‘I think gardening is more grounding, pardon the pun, but you’ve got some big overlaps between the two in kind of spatial awareness, the geography and design of coordinating things together to make a place look special.’
Chris had been coming to Guernsey on holiday for more than a decade, and he began thinking it would be the perfect place to start anew.
‘It was a total life reset, basically. I haven’t got any ancestry from here, but there’s just something about here that makes me feel like I am from here. I get that feeling very, very clearly. It’s always been here through thick and thin. It’s where I go for a bit of an escape and retreat – whether it’s just for a bit of a break, or it’s because I want to go and enjoy some bit of sunshine and look at nature. I feel at home. I feel comfortable here. I don’t feel like that anywhere else, really.’
He started doing work for local hotel groups, and within one month, he received three years’ worth of private work, and he decided to go freelance.
Since then, Chris has since established himself as one of the most prominent figures in the local horticultural scene. His Instagram page now has nearly 14,000 followers, though he estimates that his actual digital reach is around half a million, which he wants to utilise as best he can.
He gives out gardening advice once a month on BBC Radio Guernsey, is a member of the National Trust and Plant Heritage Guernsey, the latter where he helps with the Nerine Festival and preservation of a historic iris collection. He enjoys putting the island’s name out into the world and has worked with Locate Guernsey.
Most recently, he joined the committee of Floral Guernsey. It was decided this year by the States that the organisation was to receive no further funding, a decision that Chris said should be reconsidered.
‘It’s layers and layers and layers of individuals who donate their time and growing. There’s layers of expertise and communities binding together from all age levels, income brackets and backgrounds to make Guernsey a better, more attractive street scene. Once you lose that, how are you going to recall that back?’
He acknowledged the difficulty the organisation was facing to continue its work, and said that applications were currently being sent to potential benefactors.
‘There will be some things we can’t honour this year. It’s going to be a pressure for us. That’s a given, but at least we can say that we’ve made the effort to carry on embellishing what we’re doing, and there will be some lovely projects.’
Beyond promoting Guernsey’s gardening scene, Chris is also a passionate advocate for people with autism. He was diagnosed with ASD when he was 10 years old.
At school, he describes himself as having been ‘an aggressive child’ who could not converse with other students. He needed a learning support assistant with him in lessons and worked with a speech therapist to help him communicate.
‘That blank-canvas garden brought out the inner child in me, and I don’t mean in a silly way. I mean that when I was young, I used to love drawing maps. I was drawing buildings and big plans of things.
‘I was very much a lone ranger. I didn’t socialise very well with other children. And drawing would be my solitary pursuit. I was obsessed with drawing these places out.
‘It actually brought some of that back then, because I was able to then draw out my plan of my garden and have some vision for and aspirations of what I wanted to do with it.’
Chris said that his autism aided him in his development as a horticulturalist.
‘We well know that it can affect people in very different ways. It affects me in a very high functioning way, seemingly that I can go out now and speak to audiences – but it all depends on the environment, because if I were to be put in an environment that was unsettling to me, I’d go into total shut-down mode.
‘I’ve got a photographic memory, which means that I can coordinate textures, patterns, colours, seasonal succession, memorise it. I also remember quite a lot of the Latin of the plants as I go along. I have a very statistical brain in that respect.’
He wants to use his platform to show that people with autism can make a real impact on society given the right environment.
‘You’ve just got to give them that platform really to get there. There are bound to be followers here and out of Guernsey that go, “Oh, I’ve got a son that’s in your situation, and he loves gardening. I’d love him to be able to do this”.’
During his own gardening RHS exams, he said that his marks were ‘all over the place.’
‘It doesn’t suit my development style. My concern is a lot of neurodiverse people fall by the wayside because it is too challenging for them to go and sit in a formal, structured exam hall where their talent doesn’t get recognised if they panic and don’t get the mark — whereas they can fly outside and know what to do.’
Mr Jesson’s long-term ambition is to be able to train islanders up in qualifications locally.
‘I’d love to support young people back into doing gardening. It used to be known as the subject that you did at school if you weren’t very bright, and we’ve gone away from that. Now, horticulture is really a specialist industry. I feel more clever doing this than the job with two degrees that I went and trained for and spent £37,000 in tuition fees for. There will be people out there that are wanting to do this, but they can’t here, because the framework is not there.
‘Of course, we don’t have the horticultural industry as it was. We have pockets of it still doing very well. I love showing off to the outside world what is here, who are growing things here, who’s supplying flowers and can export them, who’s doing flower arranging. Guernsey needs some more role models to bring in that kind of love affair with gardening within its own population back.’
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